I don't know how is it like in Czech Republic, but here when you say "boardgame", people think about chess, domino, horse-race & bets (dostihy a sazky) and a few others. If you try to show something modern to such people, like Puerto Rico, Catan, Caylus or whatever, their reaction is either "hurr, too hard to learn" or "too childish". Heck, even when I mention something like Warhammer or Magic the gathering, the response is "wat?".

http://boardgamegeek.com/ very often helps with manuals.

I just grew up in a world full of board games. Right around the corner was a club with 2 rooms full of board games, there I took part in nationwide championships of Settlers of Catan, I went to board game trade shows and for real fans I would recommend:

Betrayal at the House on the Hill
Descent (only 6 pounds weight the box)
Marre Nostrum
RoboRally
Ursuppe
El Grande
Kill Dr. Lucky (for the fun in between)
and many more.

How can anyone say underground to these classic good pearls of board games? And compared to Settlers of Catan those are more underground.

I don't know if it's a Czech thing or just my circle of friends, but most people I know like the modern stuff, and have played either Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne at the very least. Admittedly, persuading them to try the heavier games can be difficult; my Agricola box, for example, sees very little use, as the contents of it look somewhat scary at a first glance.

Fun fact for the foreign audience: "Dostihy a sázky" is a copyright-infringing Czechoslovak clone of Monopoly, created because the theme of the original game really would not get past the good old communist censorship. So there are horses instead of property, and horse races instead of houses and hotels, but otherwise it's absolutely identical. Strangely, the game is in print again; I honestly don't know how they resolved the copyright issues.

Only time I played Catan was the Capcom game Catan on the N-Gage. I can't say I was impressed.

You could also try http://games.asobrain.com/ where you can play catan (It is called xplorers there) with the expansion Cities and knights too. And there are some crazy maps also.

Thanks, yeah. I'm really into cards and dice games but on the PC and if they have A.I. opponents to practice with that's all the better.

One of my favourites is a French game called "Montjoie!'

http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-MONTJOIE/montjoie

So here's my personal theory about the tabletop version of Settlers - feel free to correct me if I'm displaying a fundamental misunderstanding about the game's core mechanics or if I'm just too ignorant about some details about the game -

I think Settlers is grossly unfair. Maybe my luck is rotten or maybe I just plain suck (maybe too much of the latter and less of the former)? But in my experience, it's almost impossible for the player who has the last opportunity to pick his settlement starting location to have any decent chance of winning. I appreciate that that player can put down two settlements on the first building phase, but all too often it means that that player is fatally starved for brick, ore, or wood - and Heaven help you if you roll a seven and someone sticks you up the backside with the robber.

In some cases you can't even play offensively against stronger players (i.e. blocking their roads or settlement locations) because you're stuck in the middle of nowhere on the board, where nobody else is building or interested in going, and everyone else already has a massive abundance of whatever resource you've got coming out of your ears.

IMHO, for a game like Settlers, every player should have an equal chance of winning, and from my (admittedly limited) personal experience, you'd might as well call the game at the very beginning. At least Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride are a little more even handed in this regard.

/bitter rant

You gotta be kidding about underground, Catan is in your face to an amount that sickens me a bit. It's a good game, but not outstanding enough to overshadow much better games to the extent it does. There's video game versions on several platforms (probably all). You can bet it's featured at any game shop and at all board game tourneys. It's at every trade show, people were playing Catan in the middle of the PAX expo hall for goodness' sake!

It's a good game, not too complex but very nicely made and features diplomacy (via trading discussions) and strategy and empire building. The main reason it's so popular is that it came out really early (middle of the 90s) when these kind of polished strategy-empire-building games were rare. Since then millions of alternatives have emerged and many of them are better. But it has this reputation of being the flagship of a genre, a true classic, probably even overrated for what it really is. Every GOGer should know what I am speaking of (Zork, Ultima, Civilization 1,...) :)

Actually, I feel the worst position is the one before the last. The really good hexes are already taken and unlike the last player, you do not have the chance to at least grab two of the remaining that make good sense together. The third one is picking up scraps in both of his turns.
This is definitely true, and the reason I don't play SoC anymore. In the end, it's the dice that is the problem. From my observations (and I've played this game a lot), if you don't get any or just very few cards in the first two rounds of dice rolls (something you can't influence in any way), you might as well give up, as you're never ever going to catch up to the other players. Most games I've seen have one or two players who lose the chance to win relatively early in the game, and for the rest of it are just sitting there, rolling the dice and praying it would already end. That's not good design.

I've also witnessed a game where a 2 was rolled considerably more times than a 5, which effectively determined the winner -- sitting on what theoretically is the most worthless position in the game. The element of randomness really hurts Settlers of Catan, in my opinion.

Do check out Puerto Rico; there is almost no randomness in that game, which is one of the reasons I like it.

I think it's just gained recent popularity with releases to the consoles and handhelds. It's been around for ever but I just started hearing about it more and more recently.

Back three years ago I first heard about it downloading and trying to get it to run on my cell phone but that was the only place I saw it and I quickly forgot the name of it and didn't start finding it again until this month.

You have to admit though when it comes to the US and Western-influenced countries like NZ - the only well known board games over here are all the Hasro and Parker Bros games and the only table tops that actually get played are Yu Gi Oh and Magic the Gathering - I haven't even seen people playing table top D&D any more.

@Carnival Theres quite alot of this stuff in new zealand. Do you have a crackerjack where you live? they look like a kids shop but they have a huge range of euro board games to. Finding someone to play them with is the problem lol. I have carcassonne and about 8 expansions and played it heaps years ago but nowadays noones keen. i got catan awhile back to but have yet to have a game. Mightyape.co.nz was pretty good for this stuff to. not sure if they still carry it tho

theres a whole bunch of those games over here.
Settlers of catan , sea expension , ship expension.
I've even seen one based on star wars.

I like to play it IRL on a cardboard version.

I still have it on cd somewhere aswell.

It seems like it is just your circle of friends, or all the Czech people I know don't know those games either.

You have strange, strange tastes.